someone’s shoes. It had been her turn to sweep the stairwell the previous Saturday. She’d done it though, hadn’t she?
Then she remembered. Saturday had been a very bad day. She’d stayed in bed ’til noon with a terrible headache, and, in the afternoon, she had to do a school project with her younger son that involved plastic bottles and soap powder. She hadn’t swept! Right after lunch, she would come out and get rid of that mud. Where had it come from anyway? It hadn’t rained for days. Mud clumps? Who could have brought them in? No wonder Mrs. Meyer looked at her in an odd way.
She passed the second floor landing, and her eyes lingered on the apartment door on the left. The Meyers made a point of decorating for the season and now were getting ready for Easter. A plastic bunny sat on the top shelf of a shoe rack. They each had three pairs of shoes neatly stacked: his on the bottom, hers on the shelf above his. The decorations were on the top shelf.
The bunny perched on a nest of vine wood. For the Christmas season, Emma knew that the nest served as a manger. Now the fat bunny teetered there, looking evil and cross-eyed. He stared down on a colony of smaller rabbits arranged to look like a family at a picnic. There was momma rabbit, several babies arranged around a plastic carrot and, for some reason, a couple of red potatoes, and, farther afield, plastic greenery, and colored eggs.
A woven basket held several decorated eggs that Emma recognized. There were a few Emma had bought them, supposedly hand painted in Russia. There was one egg Mr. Meyer had painted in his younger years. It was made to look like a devil’s face, and he claimed it was the egg that had won him the annual egg-crunching tournament. And if that were true, he had cheated. Emma had lifted it one day and knew that it was a clay egg. Two others, delicately edged with acid on a brown onion-skin background were Mrs. Meyer’s inheritance from her father, who, according to her recollections, had to have been a most wonderful man. Emma knew that Mrs. Meyer’s mother had killed herself when the girl had been in her teens. Possibly Mr. Meyer had been a better father than husband.
By now she had reached her own landing. The apartment across from her own had recently changed hands, and she didn’t know her neighbors yet. She knew they were foreign and came from some Eastern Block country, Serbia or somewhere. They were young and without children. He seemed sullen and she afraid whenever Emma ran into either of them in the hallway.
She slotted the key into her front door while slipping off her shoes and pushed the door open. The apartment was still, empty, and cold. The dark hallway, as always, made her catch her breath, and she flipped the light switch before stepping in. All the doors were shut the way she had left them before going out. On the left was the door to the kitchen and, directly across from it, was the dining room. She opened both to admit as much light as possible. Despite the ceiling fixture, a dim one-bulb affair in a curlicue hood which made her think of a meringue pie, the hallway was always dark. The thin light trickling through the kitchen window did nothing to lighten the hallway. Instead, it made it more frightening by creating shadows. She had once described it to a friend as part of the set for Rosemary’s Baby, the nightmare hallway where hands would reach out for Rosemary when she walked by on her way to meeting the devil. And, although her friend swore the hallway came from the movie Repulsion, Emma stuck by her own memory. What remained the truth was that entering her own home was a terrifying act of defeating herself.
Emma shook herself into action. She hung her coat on the coat rack next to the kitchen door where a selection of outdoor items had claimed space, much of it long unused. There was a man’s hat from a long-forgotten dinner party. There were several scarves from a couple of seasons ago when they had all been into scarves, the more colorful the better. There were two or three plastic raincoats, one so tiny she doubted even her younger son would be able to squeeze into it.
”I will clean out this rack along with the kids’ closets this week. I’ll start right after I sweep the stairs.” She promised this out loud, convinced it would make her follow through. Although it wasn’t always so, she kept doing it—just in case.
She had left the apartment door open and now heard the thunder of children’s feet coming up the stairs. The sound propelled her into the kitchen, shoving the apartment door closed with one foot on the way past. Most likely it was her upstairs neighbors’ kids; their school let out ten minutes earlier than her own. She noticed the flashing light on the answering machine and pressed the button. Manfred wasn’t going to make it home for lunch. She breathed a sigh of relief and immediately felt a stab of guilt. She had forgotten his dry cleaning again!
“Thank God, he’s not coming home. I’m going right after lunch,” she promised.
In the kitchen, she switched on the electric kettle on her way to the refrigerator, then wondered if there was any water left in it but decided to check the fridge first. There was nothing in it but some leftover salad, bottles of ketchup and vinegar, jars of pickles, and tubes of mayonnaise and mustard. She remembered she had gone out this morning to do two errands: groceries and dry cleaning. Then she’d been sidetracked by trying to see color, the tropical reef in the river, and meeting Andy. With her head still in the refrigerator, she suddenly wondered where the idea about the reef had come from. It was a more visceral experience certainly than a mere dream could be. She’d never been to a tropical island, never snorkeled on a reef. It had to have been in a movie or maybe an aquarium somewhere.
The teakettle was making a strangled hissing sound. She slammed the refrigerator shut and lifted the kettle off its electric base, taking it over to the sink. When she ran water into the pot through the spout, it wheezed and steamed. There had been no water in it. She wondered if electric kettles could be melted if they ran dry. Someone should invent one that shut itself off when there was no water in it … a mind could do that. Otherwise, if you shot too much electricity through it, it would boil dry.
The kettle full, she set it back on its base and flipped the switch. She headed for the cabinet that held dry food and found a package of Maggi instant mashed potatoes. “Time to buy more,” she reminded herself and dumped the contents into a bowl, then settled at the kitchen sink to wait. She switched the radio on to her favorite oldies station, and “Sitting on the dock of the Bay” drifted in, filling the kitchen with sound.
“Ahhh, perfect—sitting and waiting,” she told herself and hummed along, trying to discern the words. They had something to do with California, which finally brought back her dream: the roller coaster, the pacified ocean, the bright sun—a romantic place if there ever was one. She wondered who she would be if she were living in California. It didn’t seem as if people there had to cook lunch. All they did was go to restaurants, fast-food places, and took picnics to the beach.
Would she be efficient there? Would she remember to do things? She was sure that, if she lived in California, she wouldn’t be home to cook at noon. They served school lunches there. Or was that another rumor?
The door banged open and hit the wall. “Hi, Mom,” she heard in stereo. Ron and Karl had arrived together. Although they were three years apart in age, they still played together like puppies when they were at home. In the outside world when they were among their friends, they kept apart, particularly Karl, being too cool to hang out with his little brother. Their shoes hit the floor with dull thumps.
“Hang up your coats,” she shouted even though she could already hear a swooshing sound of jackets tossed in the direction of the coat rack and sliding down the wall to the floor. The next instant, the boys were in the kitchen like a dense tornado sucking up all the available air. Emma had noticed she often felt the urge to open the windows when the boys came storming in from the outside. Not only did the air implode, space itself felt denser. It was just like the science project Ron had been working on—the “storm in a bottle” project. She could see herself being sucked in.
She placed a couple of bowls in front of the two boys. The mashed potatoes were watery, since she was all out of milk, but she had provided the ketchup bottle. The boys squirted the red goo happily on top of the mounds and ate without complaints.
The next hour flew by in a concert of talk, questions, fights, and laughter. Emma participated, refereed, and soothed in turn. Then the shoes clumped back down the stairs, and the apartment fell silent for the afternoon. Emma sat at